Showing results by narrator "Aven Shore" in All Categories

TC's adventures continue. This time he decides to join a fighting tournament in Saramis, and it is not just a simple tournament. It is called a Five Star Tournament where the winner will be able to get a five star gold companion, Angel, as a prize. The reason sounds enticing but also suspicious. Having spent enough time learning about the local life, TC’s hunch tells him there is more to the tournament than everyone thinks. Strange rules and Angel’s Master’s unwillingness to see anyone until the winner is decided adds to the mystery.

Fran Stewart has fallen in love with the little boy she is set to adopt from the Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan. Just as she enters the final stage of the adoption process, a sinister coalition of politicians, bureaucrats, and cynics, begin working to halt international adoptions. Fran's fight get her son home, based on the real life six year drama over international adoption in Kyrgyzstan, is the subject of Kyrgyzstan 2008-2009: A Love Story.

In VOLUME 9 of The Things Our Fathers Saw® series, ‘Homefront/Women At War’, we will take an often-overlooked view of the story of World War II. You will visit with the people on the homefront, from schoolkids navigating growing up during the Great Depression and the War, to the women on the factory floor and the armed services, newly independent but having to fight for their rights and later, their jobs, laying the seeds of societal change for the future.

A simple riddle was the clue that started the sword-for-hire Corson and her sorceress companion, the Lady Nyctasia, on a hunt for the greatest treasure ever hidden. But this long-abandoned treasure is the hoard of the dread Cymvelan Circle, whose scattered members are coming together again to claim what is theirs....

Her beloved city in dire straits after a bloody civil war, the spell-casting Lady Nyctasia is forced to seek alliance with a neighboring state. But the rumored marriage-treaty has loyal swordswoman Corson whetting her blade…matrimony being no proof against murder. Between NYC and the cloaked assassins stands only a tormented nobleman—whose enigmatic past bears close examination indeed.

Cobb wanted a simple life. He wanted excellent steaks, great coffee, friends, and a quiet place to restore his favorite ship. Working for a recovery operation turned out to be the best place to find parts cheap. She had other plans for him. He wanted the staff of the deep space salvage ship, Oxcart, to treat him just like another member of the crew. Not the man he really was. Light years from Earth, he thought his secrets, his past, wouldn't matter. Especially not to her.

The rich and famous are converging on the iconic Savoy Hotel in swinging '60s London—including a famous Broadway producer with anger issues, a demanding Indian raja, and a gorgeous film star with certain kinky predilections. All is as it should be—until the murder of a showgirl threatens to scandalize the hotel.

Paisley Sutton hates to see an old barn falling down, so when she has a chance to take in a crew of friends to salvage timbers, she goes in with gusto. But when they find the bones from a decades-old murder, Paisley begins to wonder if maybe some things should just be let go to ruins. Maybe some secrets need to stay buried. If Paisley decides to salvage more than just wood and reveal the murderer, will she be the next body buried in a barn?

Ghosts just don’t show up for anybody. So when I meet the spirit of a former slave named Moses, I know he needs my help. But I didn’t expect to be taking on half of my town, or the powerful men who seem to run everything and have done so for years. Secrets are being uncovered, and some people would do anything to keep them buried, no matter who gets hurt. I’ll need the help of history and friends I can trust if I want to save Moses’ graveyard and protect his legacy. If only everyone believed it was one worth protecting….

Originally published in 1852, Roughing It in the Bush by Susanna Moodie, with contributions from her husband John Wedderburn Dunbar Moodie, is a vibrant, humorous, and wry description of their arrival and life in the young country of Canada after their immigration in 1832 and settlement in the rugged backwoods of what is now Ontario - unimaginably difficult but also breathtakingly beautiful by turns.

The life of a sword-for-hire was often uncertain, but for beautiful, sensual Corson Brenn Torisk it was the only one worth living. When Corson was hired by the Lady Nyctasia, it seemed that fortune was smiling at last. The Lady was pretty, amusing, and rich, and her reputation for sorcery, she assured her new bodyguard, was greatly exaggerated. For Corson had little liking for magic, and less for magicians. But she had a high regard for her own skin, and when her employer's enemies proved both numerous and determined, she soon decided a sword was not enough.

After a lifetime of failed relationships, non-binary history professor Sam Bell is committed to a new (non)romantic strategy: Thirst Only. It's the actual drinking where things get too complicated, where Sam inevitably gets hurt. Sam is good at being thirsty, though, especially when it's karaoke night at The Moonlight Cafe. Moonie's is fun. Comfortable. Safe. Except for tonight, when one by one, all of Sam's friends abandon them. Disappointed, they prepare to leave—until their #1 karaoke crush catches their eye . . .

Brigid—that’s the Irish Breej, not “Bridge-id,” though it’s not like she’d correct you—has had a rough go of it. Her mother abused her when she was little, her best friend (and secret crush) is too busy chasing some blonde to answer Brigid’s calls, and she lost her job thanks to chronic pelvic pain with no identifiable cause. As a self-doubting, disabled adult, she’s certain that everything that has happened to her is her fault. Now her mother has gone missing and Brigid’s only option is to move back into her childhood home in the idyllic Midwestern town of St. Charles, Illinois.

The ancient and enigmatic continent of Zannondale had seen its fair share of sorrow. Tortured and despoiled by the wars that had devastated its once glittering realms, it still felt the aftereffects centuries later. And now, from far back into the past, a new and more powerful evil than ever is rising, one that threatens to turn Zannondale’s fields to dust and her cities to ashes. The brutal and merciless Baron Chronus hasonly one desire and that is to rule over all, no matter what. And for two young men, Dorian and Dain, it means the end of their carefree lives forever.

Daya, bearing the burden of being Heiako, Unwanted, confronts the unforgiving trials of school, where she becomes a target of relentless bullying by those physically imposing. Deep within her core, a steadfast resolve to stand up against injustice propels her forward, poised to confront the very essence of fear.

In the Podgorze district of Krakow sits the Under the Eagle pharmacy, a family-run business that has long served Jews and Poles alike. Since Poland's occupation by German forces, Irena, a pharmacist, has watched and worried as the store's access to medications is reduced to a trickle. But now come rumors that there is more to fear than dwindling supplies.

She thought she was just going to reminisce, enjoy the Northern Lights, and celebrate an author, but a murderer had other ideas.

Answering an inner call to seek the Truthseer, a youth questioning their gender identity flees from a joyless home and a shadowy past. The Truthseer, sought for her wisdom, questions her purpose and doubts her ability to truly assist those in need. As she tends her beehives with the companionship of a watchful goose, the bee magic warns of a growing disquiet in the Harmony. For all the help she’s shared, might she be the one most in need?

A 300-year-old house should be full of metaphorical skeletons, not real ones. But when Paisley Sutton is invited in to salvage the valuables from the attic of an old plantation house, she finds more than she expected amongst the Christmas decorations and trunks of old letters. As she begins to research, she discovers the story of this house has ties to almost everyone she knows, including her own family.

When Paisley Sutton gets the chance to salvage from her first antique log cabin, she is ecstatic, until she finds the body of a murdered man in the back room. When she and her friends begin to look into who he is and why he’s dead, they uncover a heap of stories no one in town wants them to know.